Interview: Lennart Poettering - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/ <comment> vezzy-fnord Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely.

So by this logic, a standalone Unix kernel is not Unix-like, but a fully integrated DOS clone, is.

In addition:

 _Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convince every committee that mattered, bit by bit._

So there was, in fact, a PR campaign.

 _So Journald is a requirement, and Udev is a requirement. But pretty much all other components are completely optional._

Though for some reason the build system doesn't let you disable a ton of these components by default.

 _The committers group is quite diverse, and for us it's quite an exercise in making the diversity of the community be reflected in the diversity of the people who work on it._

This is not as idealistic as Lennart portrays it. See Fallacy #13 here: [http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest- fall...](http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest- fallacies.html)

<comment><USER2> "So there was, in fact, a PR campaign."

Er, how do you think the Systemd developers convinced these technical teams to use Systemd? With bribes? Sexual favours? Or perhaps, you know, using the software itself?

It's funny. The lead developers of Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, Debian etc. etc. etc. have all chosen to use Systemd. Yet for some reason, many commentators assume these people -- distro technical leads -- simply don't have a clue, and have switched their projects to Systemd because Lennart is somehow forcing it on them.

All these distro developers, people a LOT smarter than me, and putting in more work than me, have chosen Systemd. That says a lot to me, and I'm not going to judge them. I'm still on the fence about a lot of Systemd, but to say that major distros have switched because of "PR campaigns" is ridiculous.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Hold up. Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work. The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes (Debian with cdrkit, sticking with libav for too long, the PRNG bug, etc.) and they may not be fully in line with the intricacies and conceptual differences between process management, init, supervision, hotplug and so on. There's lots of misinformation from both sides and a lot of knowledgeable people (like those maintaining powerful daemontools derivatives) have never been ones to proselytize, but stick to their inner circles.

Furthermore, how are you sure the decision to adopt was entirely technical in nature? Perhaps they realized that the incoming systemd-integrated Linux desktop userland wasn't worth the maintenance hassle of trying to avoid it?

The way Lennart worded those sentences sounded funny. He is known to distort and exaggerate when promoting, for which I don't blame him, since his goal is to get his software adopted, but nonetheless. systemd proponents have been all too eager to completely dismiss any political meddling on part of systemd's adoption as totally unsubstantiated, insisting it was purely "technical merits". Lennart's words paint a subtly different picture, at the least.

Most people don't fully grasp the state of Unix process management, so it's no surprise they're susceptible. For example, the only alternatives that have been debated primarily were Upstart and OpenRC. That's a red flag.

<comment><USER2> "Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work."

Even when almost every distro has switched? If the situation were 50-50, I'd agree with you. But given that Systemd has been overwhelmingly adopted by distros, I think that says alot.

"The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes"

Yes, but again, they surely haven't all made a giant mistake, right? I don't buy the "they've switched because of upcoming desktop userland" argument either. Distro devs -- like Linux users in general -- aren't ones to roll over easily.

With overwhelming support from distro developers, the people who know their stuff, Systemd must be doing something right. And if you look at the Benefits section here, you can see a lot of things that are appealing to distro devs: [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "if you do an init system but still invoke all the shell scripts and all the other things needed to bring up the system, you've only solved part of the problem."

That's exactly what I think is wrong with systemd. If a script bring a speed issue on start up, it should fixed by optimizing the script, use/create another script language with parallelism and higher pref, or even turn it into a compiled program. This is not supposed to be the problem of the init system developper.

In fact the only purpose of an init system is to start executables in a defined order, not more.

This is going to be like X, a huge pile of unmaintainable code, and that's definitely not the UNIX philosophy.

<comment><USER4> > In fact the only purpose of an init system is to start executables in a > defined order, not more.

A _good_ init system should also do process supervision and integrate with the OS's resource-management subsystem (on Linux, cgroups). You could do that with an even bigger pile of shell scripts, of course, and some Linux distros towards the end of the sysvinit era have been trying to. But at some point a giant tangle of shell scripts which are full of copy/paste boilerplate and frequent bugs starts to look like not the best solution.

It's not like systemd is the first system to come to that conclusion, either. Solaris dropped sysvinit 10 years ago, and OSX dropped its BSD-ish init in the same year. Earlier than that, djb also wrote an init replacement called daemontools, which was a bit of a step in that direction, though a smaller one. That got some uptake but was hampered by some of the oddities of being djbware (e.g. for years it was "license-free software", and it was only intermittently maintained).

<comment><USER5> Process supervising is for process supervisors. Init's jobs is to be able to start a process supervisor.

<comment><USER4> Are there any examples of a process supervisor that isn't also intended to replace the traditional init system? Even systems less ambitious than SMF/launchd/systemd, like daemontools and runit, aim to replace sysvinit, because otherwise you'd have to specify _twice_ , in different ways, how each service should start and stop (though it's possible to set up configurations where that works).

<comment><USER6> At the moment I'm using OpenRC which does exactly that on top of sysvinit, as are most Gentoo users. You don't have to specify everything twice because init never actually knew how to start and stop services in the first place - with a traditional sysvinit configuration that was all handled by scripts that it started, and OpenRC replaces those scripts.

<comment><USER7> sysvinit does have built-in service management via inittab(5); unfortunately it is so primitive that in practice it is only used to spawn getty(8).

<comment><USER8> > unfortunately it is so primitive that in practice it is only used to spawn > getty(8).

The AIX System Resource Controller is spawned by a record in /etc/inittab. (AIX actually comes with utilities for maintaining /etc/inittab such as mkitab.) So too is svscanboot in daemontools 0.75 and later. Gerrit Pape is currently having problems with the Debian package for running runit, precisely because runit has for some years been run from /etc/inittab in some configurations and in Debian 8 it is suddenly no longer a file whose existence is always guaranteed because it is part of an "essential" package. There are some other packages in Debian 7 that have _undocumented_ dependencies from the existence of an /etc/inittab file, because they too read/write it for their own purposes. I have yet to verify whether they've been fixed for Debian 8.

Don't think for one second that in the second decade of the 21st century people only ever use /etc/inittab for getty. (-:

This is one of the quieter on-going problems for Debian 8. It switches one to using systemd, because that's the Debian 8 default; but there's no upgrade path or compatibility mechanism for /etc/inittab. Every few months, another "I was (unknowingly) using /etc/inittab; I upgraded; it broke." person seems to pop up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The part about Gnome and logind vs consolekit could have been more detailed.

Poettering was sitting as co-maintainer of consolekit for some time. Then as logind got underway, the maintenance was to pass to Ubuntu under a new project name. But i can't find any trace of this actually happening.

After that the state of consolekit as a project seems to have been in limbo, until recently when a XFCE dev forked the existing code to github as consolekit2.

Apparently said dev would have loved to continue consolekit in place rather than fork, but the final email list traffic between Poettering and Ubuntu gave him the impression that Poettering wanted to see consolekit dead.

So it may well be that people didn't maintain the consolekit code in Gnome because they had the impression that consolekit was dead and buried.

but then Gnome and systemd devs seems to share a "one true way" attitude.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Oracle actually picked up ConsoleKit and beefed it up significantly for Solaris, giving it true multi-seat support. [1]

However, they did this in complete silence, so very few people actually know about this.

[1] [https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris-desktop~spec- files/file/79574...](https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris-desktop~spec- files/file/79574a01c676/patches/) (15 patches)

<comment><USER9> Things like this makes me wonder if RH changed once Oracle bought Sun and then forked RHEL into Oracle Linux. Thus Oracle went from being something of a partner to being a competitor, and RH rolled back on various behaviors (package patch sets etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a lot of complaint about logical fallacies in the comments of this article. Does anyone know what they're referring to?

Seemed like quite a clear interview to me, and interesting to hear a bit of the history behind such a fundamentally useful piece of software.

<comment><USER11> It's probably from readers of this blog post where "logical" and "fallacy" is quite often used (careful, needs js for viewing): [http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest- fall...](http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest- fallacies.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "But we believed that an init system should work the other way around, where you say: this is where I want to go to, and you figure out the rest. Because of that design, Upstart was very simple, but it put a lot of complexity on admins and developers, because you actually had to write down all these rules"

...and this is the problem. Pushing this kind of complexity into PID 1 (or however systemd achieves this) is exactly the wrong solution. The init system should not be clever, or contain an "engine that can figure out what the computer is supposed to be doing" as he says later. This really smells of second system syndrome.

In reality even with a simple init that pushes complexity to the admins, end users rarely incur the cost. The distribution authors set up init as needed and end users don't need to worry unless they makes changes. Then you get the best of both worlds: easy maintainability and a simple, reliable init system.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure if he is really clueless or just trying to flame wars.

<comment><USER14> i honestly think he believes his stance is the only correct one. you can see it in the way he answered the questions.

the bit where he picks apart upstart, gentoo, etc., are nothing more than callous, myopic opinions yet he answers them with cheerful conviction.

technical arguments can be made for or against any piece of code. but, he dismisses other projects with a wave of his hand firmly stating that systemd is the "only" correct evolution.

i'm am neutral on systemd. do i think the old init system(s) are the right way? not really. do i think systemd is the right way? not really. would i be fine with systemd in the future? perhaps. would i be fine with another bit of code? perhaps.

but to dismiss the concerns of a large number of community members, to neglect or downright deny bugs and issues, to shoehorn a project into _everything_ while closing your ears to everyone else, these are my issues with the project.

if it works, great. but at least open your eyes and ears and work with everyone.

i migrated my home kit to freebsd from debian because i was having errors. failed boots. crashes. config problems. and i didn't have a decade of old crusty init scripts to begin with.

what used to be rock solid on my hardware became annoying to deal with.

i'm all for change and evolution in software/systems and i don't personally have a problem with poettering or what he is trying to do, but he's doing it in a piss poor way.

<comment><USER15> I don't get how an opinion like this:

"...to make it clear, I think Upstart actually has its benefits. The source code is very, very nice, and it's very simple, but I think it's too simple. It doesn't have this engine that can figure out what the computer is supposed to be doing."

is callous and myopic?

<comment><USER9> I find myself wondering why the init is supposed to figure out what the computer is to be doing. That kind of "automagical" behavior is what drove me bonkers when trying to use Windows for more than a games console...

<comment><USER16> I dunno. If it's able to do what you want automatically that's amazing. If I can just plug the printer in and have it work that's amazing. If I can turn the wireless on my laptop on and it works that's amazing. And so on.

The problems arise when it _doesn 't_ automatically do what you want it to do and you don't have a good way of fixing it yourself. I'm not in a position to understand init systems so I will be in this camp if there's ever _any_ problem with _any_ init system. What matters to me, as the end user, is how likely it is to work automatically.

If systemd 'just works', then what's the problem? If systemd is broken... well, that's a problem, isn't it. But from what I've seen a lot (though not all, of course) of the arguments against it are highly political/philosophical and aren't based on whether it's actually working or not.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Hotplug isn't the job of systemd to begin with, though. It's the job of the device manager, which on Linux is usually udev (but alternatives like eudev, mdev, smdev and vdev exist) - udev being a part of the systemd repository and to an extent coupled with it (which will become complete when kdbus is merged into mainline Linux), however it's still a rather distinct piece of software that maintains the hardware database and listens to kernel uevents.

So if your init system is handling hotplug events, then that's some bad design. systemd doesn't stoop that low, though it still has plenty of mistakes - like putting the INI parser in PID1. As an example, even Apple put launchd's XML parser as a separate process!

<comment><USER9> There is tight interaction between udev and systemd. Heck, udev was folded into the systemd code (you find it now as a sub-dir of the systemd source tree over at freedesktop.org) because they didn't want code duplication...

This after having udev exist as a independent project for a decade.

These days the only way to download and install udev manually is to download the whole of systemd and then extract udev from that. Something that caused Gentoo to fork udev into eudev.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > So we slowly started doing stuff that all the other Linux distros did, and > implemented that in simple C code that was fast and parallelised.

That's part of my issue with systemd: replacing safe (-r) shell scripts with C. Sure, it's fast, but I trust C about as far as I can throw it (and yes, I realise that the Linux kernel is written in C: it constantly has local root exploits, which proves my point). I really wish that projects like systemd were written in something of like Ocaml, Go, Rust, Common Lisp—anything fast enough but safer.

Also, it probably doesn't help Lennart that he looks like the Rolfe Gruber in the Sound of Music…

<comment><USER18> > That's part of my issue with systemd: replacing safe (-r) shell scripts with > C.

Because shell scripts are always safe, right? [1][2][3] We used to get root on Android devices by exploiting poorly-written shell scripts.

> Also, it probably doesn't help Lennart that he looks like the Rolfe Gruber > in the Sound of Music…

Personal attacks won't help your case.

[1] [https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for- linux/issues/3671](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for- linux/issues/3671)

[2] [https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and- abbandoned/commi...](https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and- abbandoned/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac)

[3] [http://www.exploit-db.com/papers/13199/](http://www.exploit- db.com/papers/13199/)

<comment><USER19> While bugs happen in any language, shell scripts are _far_ easier to debug than C. You tend to not get nasty interactions spanning multiple source files in shell, where the bugs tend to on a single line (like in that Valve example, where rm should have never been used in such a careless/negligent manner). On the other hand, are you sure you've checked for _all_ of the potential undefined behavior problems in your C programs? These are far more numerous[1] than many people realize.

[1] [https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode...](https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode/CC.+Undefined+Behavior)

<comment><USER9> That is, imo, the beauty of shell script.

At its core, they are the very same commands you would give manually. but wrapped in basic programming logic (if clauses etc).

thus you can walk the shell script and get a good feel for why the script is doing what it is doing.

If you want to do that with a binary, you pretty much have to either hit it with a debugger (i think a previous thread here on Hacker News actually recommended using strace to inspect systemd boot behavior) or have the source code sit beside it for reference.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


McDonald's stock hits record high, replacing cashiers with kiosks - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/mcdonalds-hits-all-time-high-as-wall-street-cheers-replacement-of-cashiers-with-kiosks.html?ref=um_md <comment><USER2> Here comes automation.

This is huge. It takes one and the rest will follow.</comment>


How TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing <comment><AUTHOR> Also if you check the AndroidManifest.xml of TikTok app you'll see they are tracking persistent device identifiers coupled with phone #. Then if you uninstall TikTok you'll still have a bunch of their files in shared space that other Chinese apps can pick up were you to install them, presumably so they can track you even if you uninstall the app.

<comment><USER2> Is this something we can report? Or is it allowed in Android?

<comment><USER3> Is there a way to prevent an app from leaking data put like this, e.g, some kind of sandbox disk where files written with one app cannot be accessed by another app (until the user allows it - like photo sharing etc)?

<comment><USER4> This would be enforced in the next version of Android IIRC. If you happen to have a rooted device and trust closed-source app you can also try Storage Redirect ( [https://rikka.app/storage_redirect/](https://rikka.app/storage_redirect/) )

<comment><USER5> Can't you simply deny TikTok access to shared storage? This permission has been part of Android for a few years now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Beijing ByteDance Technology Co Ltd. is a Chinese Internet technology company operating several machine learning-enabled content platforms, headquartered in Beijing. It was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012._

What's to be surprised about exactly? This sort of thing is the norm.

<comment><USER7> It's not about surprise, it's about spreading awareness, and not allowing this kind of behavior to be normalized. If you think news is only worth spreading if it's a surprise, then you've been totally taken in by the shock-mongerers and by those who want this kind of behavior to be ignored, allowed, and encouraged.

<comment><USER6> I think the HN crowd is well aware.

<comment><USER8> The linked publication is The Guardian, which has much wider readership than HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article doesn't mention a key point: The TikTok that's available internationally is a completely separate service instance than Douyin (the Chinese version). Content/users from one aren't accessible on the other.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't mention it because it isn't really relevant. The international app is still being censored according to the same rules as the app in China.

It still prohibits users from discussing topics the CCP doesn't want brought up. (e.g. Tiananman Square, Falun Gong, organ harvesting, and Xinjiang)

The main differences are that outside of China you're not bound by their laws requiring users to sign up using their legal name and provide identification to prove as such. In addition to which people aren't being disappeared or arrested for their posts.

<comment><USER11> > The main differences are [...] In addition to which people aren't being > disappeared or arrested for their posts.

I would not recommend talking about these subjects with the international app outside China and then going to China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or maybe TikTok just want their platform to be filled with cheerful silly jokes and 10 second dance moves? And not politics, religious stuff or anti this and that ...

Maybe it is even a businesss strategy and not something the CCP actually has forced upon them.

<comment><USER13> or maybe posting simple things like any reference to a certain quadrilateral in online games like league of legends is enough for any Chinese player to be removed from the game

games are fun and completive things arent they? there shouldn't be any politics around them, yet, China decides to censor references to a certain quadrilateral by removing players from a game

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Algorithmic sorting / curated content has no place in services like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook. If I subscribe to someone I want to see all the content. I've been fighting with twitter switching to curated content for some time now, and finally recently Twitter stopped switching me back to curated ordering.

<comment><USER15> But in what order? If it is just by time stamp that will give you a lot of noise to wade through.

Use an app like talon if you want twitter ordered by time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this implemented technically? Does TikTok know what every video is saying through speech recognition?

What if I unfurl a Free Tibet flag in my video (visual only)

<comment><USER17> "... instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The issue here is the spread of Chinese Censorship beyond China. With WeChat, so far, users outside of China are not subjected to the same level of censorship when communicating with other non-Chinese users.

This is different because it subjects all users to a Chinese "standard" which basically means any conspiracy crap about how evil America is and typical whataboutism videos can be prioritized via "algorithms" while a whole range of "sensitive" issues can be blocked. It gives the Chinese government tools that slowly enable it to "guide" discussions online. What is interesting about TikTok is that unlike WeChat, it seems to have users beyond the Chinese diaspora which gives Beijing far more "soft power" influence to craft a "positive image of China"

<comment><USER19> Same could be said for other venues of online expression, including the current one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> TikTok's developers should be ashamed of themselves.

I have nothing but derision for employees who take part in implementing something so obviously horrible but do not make an attempt to move out of their job or even acknowledge what they are doing wrong.

<comment><USER21> In China you either comply and have a chance to build a company or have a job somewhere, or you don't and... you don't have a career.

<comment><USER2> It seems they are just motivating the smart people to leave the country.

<comment><USER22> Punch `China exit ban` into your favorite search engine.

<comment><USER23> From a quick web search, these seem to be more about foreign nationals being detained in China for political reasons or to compel compliance. Not great, but also not really relevant to what I thought we were talking about (ie. Chinese businesses having to make concessions to the government in order to operate).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Url changed from [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49826155](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49826155), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another incredibly vague investigation. Description of leaked guideline basically amounts to no divisive politics. Guardian yellow peril narrative: "TikTok, is advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app". What I see from the guidelines: TikTok is an app designed for kids and No Politics policies make the app friendly for kids, which is preferable to the Youtube radicalization treadmill model. IMO, the internet needs a different standards for children. Sometimes I think 90% of fights online are some variation of anonymous kids screaming at kids, adults screaming adults but is actually a kid with dumb naive hot takes. This is the right policy of kid oriented apps like TikTok and Youtube kids IMO. Not broader social media like twitter, facebook or weibo.

Original allegations by Guardian [1].

>In every case, they are placed in a context designed to make the rules seem general purpose, rather than specific exceptions. A ban on criticism of China's socialist system, for instance, comes under a general ban of "criticism/attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as constitutional monarchy, monarchy, parliamentary system, separation of powers, socialism system, etc".

>Another ban covers "demonisation or distortion of local or other countries' history such as May 1998 riots of Indonesia, Cambodian genocide, Tiananmen Square incidents".

>A more general purpose rule bans "highly controversial topics, such as separatism, religion sects conflicts, conflicts between ethnic groups, for instance exaggerating the Islamic sects conflicts, inciting the independence of Northern Ireland, Republic of Chechnya, Tibet and Taiwan and exaggerating the ethnic conflict between black and white".

TikTok claims these are deprecated guidelines:

>The old guidelines in question are outdated and no longer in use. Today we take localised approaches, including local moderators, local content and moderation policies, local refinement of global policies, and more. We also consult with a number of independent local committees and are working to scale this at a global level, including forming an independent committee of leading industry organisations and experts to continually assess these policies.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed- how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing)

<comment><USER20> > TikTok is an app designed for kids and No Politics policies make the app > friendly for kids, which is preferable to the Youtube radicalization > treadmill model.

I think this is a false dichotomy. You are mentioning two companies that play this game in bad faith. There is a middle-ground.

<comment><USER25> What is the middle-ground? The end goal is behaviour modelling of some kind that requires selective information or censorship. I'm partial to unrestricted free speech 8chan / edge-lord internet openness, but western society broadly is drifting towards censoring extremely divisive content, aka the China model. The question is where do you draw the line? DOTA conduct points that banning the most toxic players (kids) that seems to be well received? Oh no that's social credit. I predict that western and eastern social media will converge on the same censorship solutions, maybe even overlap.

<comment><USER26> You may not be American. American HN folks tend to take it for granted that their beliefs are universal.

The controversy isn't as much that TikTok bans political speech or divisive content, it's that TikTok selectively enforces it based on whether or not it is in one particular country's self-interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> as we all know, it's a private platform and they have no obligation to host speech that violates their guidelines. nothing to see here.

<comment><USER20> Being a private platform does not absolve you of social responsibility. When you take on the role of a public forum or place of communication, you also take on some social responsibility, whether you like it or not.

Whether you choose to ignore it with carefully crafted "Community Guidelines"-based legalese or you choose to respect and acknowledge it, it doesn't change the fact that the responsibility exists.

<comment><USER28> The problem with this kind of statement is "social responsibility" isn't one thing. To their social group this is what being socially responsible is. To your/my social group it isn't.

Saying "you have a social responsibility to not do that" is only one step better than arguing "I don't think you should do that" as a reason someone shouldn't do something.

<comment><USER29> More generally: being a private entity does not exempt you from criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Incentivizing free speech in a clever way!

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for this. App deleted because China is not a reliable place to do business.

<comment><USER24> Please keep nationalistic flamebait off HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER31> You are hallucinating nationalism where there is none.

China is untrustworthy because they routinely break business deals.

They violate trade agreements: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fCAut_Gr-3E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fCAut_Gr-3E)

They steal our IP: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-systematically- pries-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-systematically-pries- technology-from-u-s-companies-1537972066)

They are waging war against us with Fentanyl: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/despite-new-safeguards- fentanyl...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/despite-new-safeguards-fentanyl- trafficking-is-still-a-problem-11566597494)

Chinese Fentanyl has killed hundreds of thousands of North Americans in the Third Opium War. It's a no-brainer to pivot away from China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate companies that abide by the ideological positions of the country they're from. Hopefully the US can pass a law that bans the use of any social media app that harms Freedom of Speech through the insidious use of "Community Guidelines"

<comment><USER32> Honest question, is this supposed to be written tongue in cheek? I can't convince myself whether it is or it isn't.

<comment><USER33> I think they're serious but obviously poking fun at the incongruence where we castigate Chinese apps but are fine having domestic companies engage in similar behavior except it's not at the behest of the gov.

<comment><USER16> I personally think all speech should be free except those that advocate violence or break the law.

<comment><USER34> > advocate violence or break the law

Well I guess so much for the French or American Revolutions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sony develops new 185 TB storage tape - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27282732 <comment><USER2> This would make tape worthwhile again if the price is reasonable (<= 100$ cassette).

Currently LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Whereas they are generally more reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more drives and make up for it, and you gain improved r/w speed and _random_ access, which cannot be overstated (tape is generally a PITA to use).

Not to mention that a single tape drive is only useful if you can backup your entire system with just one tape. When LTO6 came out, I already couldn't, making a tape robot necessary. Again, to make things into perspective, today you can just buy a cheap nas with 2 drives with hotplug, and you still saved 2k$ for the tape drive.

With a 185TB tape you can seriously think to backup an entire site to a couple of cassettes again. IF price is reasonable.

<comment><USER3> >LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless.

Not at all. Oracle and IBM sell data insurance. If you save data on their tapes, that data will be their for 100 years, or you get a large chunk of money. This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections.

Sony currently doesn't offer tape insurance. Which if they want this to succeed they likely will have too as this is the main attraction of tapes. Safe long term storage.

:.:.:

There are a few technical problems.

The biggest problem overall is write speed. A T1000C tape drive (5TB Oracle) can take about 4 hours to "Fill". This is with 16 parallel writes (tracks) taking place.

Having a flat 20x more data to write could mean times in the order of 72+ hour to preform a full back up (Assume 16 parallel writes, same speed as oracle), or LONGER!

I really want to see a data sheet on this new tech not hype.

<comment><USER4> > This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections

Well tape drives don't offer insurance either... As you mentioned, Oracle and IBM do. If you have the cash you can insure anything you'd like, even hard drives.

<comment><USER3> Your missing the fundamental crux of the argument. Yes you _can insure_ a HDD. But _why_ would you?

HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower rate due to larger bits).

<comment><USER4> > HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on > your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in > 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able > temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower > rate due to larger bits).

That sounds exactly like a situation you would want insurance... Why insure the one that never goes bad?

<comment><USER3> Honestly I have to ask are you a troll? You understand how insurance works right? Basically your hedging a long term bet that and event you are insuring against won't take place.

Lets take life insurance for example, its very cheap on say 20 year olds, who are active, non-smokers. Because overall a 20 year old, active, non-smoker has a much lower chance of dropping dead over night then say a 80 year old active, non-smoker. Its pretty simple stats honestly.

Insuring a HDD for 20+ years is the equivalent of buying a 350 year life insurance policy for a human. Statically its pretty safe to say that policy will payout.

If you buy a policy that _will statically_ pay out, it means the policy total needs to be collected before the event will likely take place, therefore result in a net profit for the provider.

:.:.:

Example

So you take out a 30 year protection policy on a 2TB hard drive, this policy will pay 50 million dollars. 80% of Hard Drives fail in 4 years, which means as an insurer you need to collect AT LEAST 80% of the policy pay out by year 4 of the devices life cycle. This means you'll expect payments of ~1.041 million a month (at least). For the insurer to break even on your policy over an infinite amount of hard drives (which they're likely using a finite model), so a lot more.

Now you take a 30 year tape drive, for 50 million dollars. 1% of drives fail after 30 years. This means you can collect the total 50 million from at least 100 different contracts, meaning within 30 years each policy will only collect ~5 millions dollars in payments (13k montly payments)

The former seems completely idiotic to both the insurance agency _AND_ the business asking for it. I don't know what your point is.

:.:.:

TL;DR: For insurance to work (profitably for both parties) you can't have the certainty of the event occurring within the policies term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading articles about 400GB optical discs being designed back in 2001. Still waiting.

<comment><USER6> If you didn't happen to read the article, that is being worked on: "Sony is also working on more consumer-friendly storage - in March it announced it was working with Panasonic on the Archival Disc, which will hold 1TB of data, the equivalent of 250 DVD films"

<comment><USER5> My point is that these announcements tend not to mean much to consumers until it actually happens. If it does. Sorry to be a downer, it's just kind of disappointing. My first PC from '95 had an optical drive capable of holding more data than the hard drive. Right now, you have 2.5TB tape, you will likely not see a jump to this but rather 2.5 to 5 to 10, etc. all the way until 185TB fits the graph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if these cassettes are susceptible to 'stretching' that pained older cassette storage media.

As the tape began to wear out, it would 'stretch' and subtly change the frequency of the data stored on it, causing issues.

Anyone have any further details on this?

<comment><USER8> A properly engineered tape format will have, for lack of a better name, an "index" or synchronisation bit or signal recorded alongside the data tracks. Back in the days of videotape there was something called "control track" that served a similar purpose. In the video case it was used mostly to ensure the video being read off tape ran as close as possible to the required video standard frequency. Smaller mechanical variations where then removed electronically using a FIFO often called "time base corrector". Similar approaches can (and should) be used for data tapes in order to ensure data integrity in the face of tape stretch, etc. The other approach is to encode the data using a self clocking encoder, in which case data recovery is pretty much guaranteed at any speed so long as the data read frequency is within the read circuitry VCO's capture range. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. I think there have been hybrid optical/magnetic approches also but I am not familiar with them.

<comment><USER9> As a concrete example, you are warned not to use a bulk eraser on LTO tapes because they have servo tracks that will also get erased.

In the bad old days there were multi-platter disk drives that used e.g. the bottom surface for a servo track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Was tape ever widely used by consumers? I remember my father buying a tape drive about the time Windows 95 came out and using it to back up the family PC. Was this a common thing at that time or was it just the fact that he was a computer teacher and technically inclined?

<comment><USER11> I remember my father backing up the accounting data of the family business to tape at the end of each month. He did that for several years before eventually replacing the tapes with flash drives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd love to have this. Just like I'd love to have 3 layer bluray discs but that's a pipe dream. Consumer back up mediums are still in the stone age besides hard drives.

<comment><USER13> Is there any technical reason tape backup is so expensive and out of reach for consumers?

<comment><USER14> The true cost of tape is that of the tape drive.

Tapes themselves are pretty darn cheap. LTO-5 tapes cost $25 for 1.5TB (uncompressed). Multi-layer Blu-Ray is the only solution that is anywhere close to that cheap... but those are a pain-in-the-ass to use. (You'll need Thirty 50GB Blu-Rays to do the job of a single LTO-5 tape)

Also consider: At x8, BluRays are written at 36 MB/s. Tape Drives are read/written to at 140MB/s, making them much faster than BluRays.

The problem is that tape drives cost roughly $2000 each. So tapes only become economical when you're storing 25+ TB of data.

<comment><USER9> The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a sustained compressed (on the tape drive) speed of 160 MB/s, their a few hundred dollars more LTO-5 tape drive require 280 MB/s ... and apparently have two SAS ports. I can get by just fine with one Seagate 15K drive on another PCI-e card buffering the former, I think you'd need something more intense for LTO-5, I've read that no single hard drive can keep up with LTO-5 drives.

<comment><USER14> For people who are used to ~20MB/s (maximum) off of x4 speed 50GB BluRay drives, I think the problem you note is a "first world problem"... a problem many people would be happy to have.

On no! My Tape Drives are written too fast that they're causing me issues :-). If only my hard drives were fast enough to keep the write buffer full!

<comment><USER9> I suppose so in some ways, but shoe shining will prematurely wear out your LTO tapes and drives.

The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100 inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full speed when it's at the location to write a new block.

I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell too far behind hard disk sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that you can now hand someone the entire contents of iTunes on a cassette.

I wonder how long it'll be until a flash drive can hold this much data? I can usually find any song I want to listen to on youtube, but I think it'd be interesting to just have every song locally.

</comment><comment><USER16> Combined with the new Sandisk 4GB SAS SSD (with 6 and 8TB models to be announced soon), I wonder what impacts this will have on exa-scale data storage.

<comment><USER17> Typo; think you meant 4TB</comment></comment>


Does WebKit face a troubled future now that Google is gone? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/does-webkit-face-a-troubled-future-now-that-google-is-gone/ <comment><USER2> Yet another article full of FUD and speculation. If this, if that, maybe this, maybe that. Seriously, please. Someone reform the media industry for me. Are there any startups here doing this?

Back to the article. WebKit won't allow hooking in random JS engines. Allowing this slows things down because many DOM access optimizations can be achieved by assuming a specific engine. This is totally reasonable thing. People who are complaining don't contribute to the project at all and are just armchair critics.

Same goes for this web developer who is complaining on webkit-dev. He is an arm chair critic. Apple is talking about removing a feature that no one is stepping up to maintain. CSS variables is not a _standard_ and not close to being a standard and that is the key. If it was, Apple won't be removing it.

I don't know whats worse - armchair critics or media creating whole articles based on speculation and armchair critics.

<comment><USER3> >Are there any startups here doing this?

These kinds of articles generate more pageviews than boring, measured, and technically correct articles, so presumably if there were startups doing what you suggest, they wouldn't be doing very well. Media sensationalism stems from human nature, so it's not an problem I see being solved any time soon.

<comment><USER4> So what about boring, measured, and technically correct articles ... with crazily sensational a/b tested titles :P but seriously, I wouldn't have a problem with a sensational title, if the actual article itself does a good job of arguing for or against said title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am disappointed by this article coming from ARS, a site I have huge respect for. The article ignores parts of conversation and chooses the ones which suits its narrative. Developers were concerned about leaving unmaintained code left in the tree, which was previously only used by chrome. If you follow the thread devs were more than happy to keep it as long as someone maintained it. And finally that's what happened. Either way discussions like these are common in Open source project , any project as a matter of fact, but to spin it like this is simply manufacturing a story for page views.

</comment><comment><USER6> Puff piece, a.k.a link bait.

Anyone that goes through the discussion threads from which this article originated from will see developers cordially debating about pertinent engeneering topics regarding the future of the project. Nothing more.

I personally think both projects will thrive as a result of this fork.

</comment><comment><USER7> The root problem seems to be that Oracle and Samsung want WebKit to continue allowing Nashorn and V8 integration without actually providing any developer resource to the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, it's worse than that.

[https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-April/024...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-April/024491.html)

[https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-April/024...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-April/024484.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this may not be the easiest path (at least short-term) but I would be Apple I would only actively maintain my own JS engine but I would also try to make a nice abstraction for others JS engines, i.e. what Google chose not to do. Maybe it wouldn't be ideal for short term performances, but community wise and future wise it would be a great choice I think. Sadly I don't think this is the path Apple is going to take.

</comment><comment><USER9> As with all headlines that end with '?' the answer is no.

<comment><USER10> In this case, the link is scrotal, like you suggested.

However, Betteridge's Law of Headlines was proven wrong by Betteridge himself. For example, "What was life like opposite Thatcher?" cannot be answered by the word "no".

<comment><USER11> It can, most people would just feel like it didn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This divorce is going to be painful.

<comment><USER12> I'd say it's a bit more like Google walking out and leaving Apple with the kids. I doubt Apple will be able to sue for maintenance.

<comment><USER13> Given that Google offered repeatedly on the mailing lists to help remove any code/features that webkit no longer wanted, i don't see how it's like that at all?

<comment><USER14> And how does that help with maintaining the current functionality that Google engineers are supporting? Presumably, the code that the Webkit team wants to remove is the interface with Chrome/Chromium. That's the easy part, in the grand scheme of things.

The hard part is getting new people to pick up the features and functionality that was being worked on by people who have moved to Blink. That's going to be a huge challenge, especially for features that were half implemented.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, but people and companies come and go from open source projects all the time. You act as if this is not the typical happening in an open source project. Just because it happens to involve a large company, or a well known project, doesn't change anything.

Either the project will find/attract new contributors to support those features, or it won't. If it doesn't, it generally means it wasn't going to stay viable.

Plenty of companies left GCC and left features unmaintained. They either find new maintainers, or get removed, and the project moves on.

This is the life of an open source project. It's not like a divorce at all. It's like a large collaboration where people are free to leave at any time. When people leave, either the collaboration absorbs the loss, or it doesn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Sorry, but people and companies come and go from open source projects all the time._

Yes, bad things happen all the time. Frequency doesn't turn a bad thing good though.

<comment><USER13> Uh? It's not necessarily bad or good for a company or person to leave. It all depends on whose perspective you are using (and i'm not talking about either the company or the project). Sometimes things are bad for one project, but good for an ecosystem. Or the reverse.

Folks who started EGCS, including a company worth of folks, left GCC to do so. Was this bad for GCC? Most people with gut reactions thought it was "bad".

It certainly ended up improving the state of the world, and in fact, later turned out very good for the GCC project because it got a _much_ better GCC out of it.

Basically, I think you may need a little perspective here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of my favourite things about Hacker News; it allows you to take a peek at an article you assume is clickbait, before you give them the hits and traffic they might be angling for.

</comment><comment><USER16> Google used to contribute to Firefox before Chrome and Firefox is still alive, although more people use Chrome and IE now so it lost its popularity.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's telling that no one is asking "Will Google be able to go it alone without Apple's help?

</comment><comment><USER18> No

</comment><comment><USER19> I expect WebKit to have similar fate as KHTML actually...

<comment><USER20> I doubt it entirely. WebKit has been around since 2001, and given Apple is the creator and primary users, it will stick around.</comment></comment>


Free Tix to MLconf:Soumith Chintala of Facebook, Erich Elsen of Baidu, +more - <AUTHOR> https://mlcnyc16.eventbrite.com/?discount=MLfreeHN <comment><AUTHOR> We will be live streaming this event as well if you can't make it to NYC. Streaming info will be released day of event. Video from past events here: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjeM1xxYb_37bZfyparLS3Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjeM1xxYb_37bZfyparLS3Q)

FYI, this is my event.</comment>


FreshBooks: We're open sourcing our iPhone time tracking app for MacWorld - <AUTHOR> http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2009/01/05/were-open-sourcing-our-iphone-time-tracking-app-for-macworld/

<comment><USER2> When I first made my account I was getting interviewed by FreshBooks; I have since been hired and it is great here. While looking through some data today I found "news.ycombinator.com" as the answer to "how did you hear about FreshBooks?" on the sign up. Very cool.</comment>


NYU Eats World: An alumna laments the rise of an imperial university - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/NYU-Eats-World/148979/ <comment><USER2> I can't agree more with this piece. Having recently (5 years ago) been at NYU, I can tell you the NYU the author remembers nostalgically is completely gone. It's a shell of a school, massive and well funded, yet intellectually just going through the motions. If you are not going to Stern you are absolutely wasting your money.

<comment><USER3> NYU's law school has been an elite institution for some time. The same is true of the philosophy and Italian studies departments.

<comment><USER4> " The same is true of the philosophy and Italian studies departments"

If I may ask what kind of job can one get graduating with those degrees that will pay for the massive tuition bill? What is the expected pay for having a degree in those two majors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been interested in the ITP program [0] for awhile and would be curious to hear any graduates' responses to this article...

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisch_School_of_the_Arts#Intera...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisch_School_of_the_Arts#Interactive_Telecommunications_Program)

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is yet another thread in a long line of people complaining about NYU's rise. My personal favorite comes from the local rap group, Ratking:

      Seems random, like Stanford transplanted to the fountain and the arch
      Infecting the apple, a cancer in its heart
      Why'd you make a campus out the park?
      If it keeps spreading, It'll be deaded
      Panting and parched.

([http://rap.genius.com/Ratking-snow-beach- lyrics](http://rap.genius.com/Ratking-snow-beach-lyrics))

</comment><comment><USER7> A giant satellite campus is sufficient condition to say a university "eats world"? Does this expression mean something less grandiose than I imagine?

<comment><USER8> I think the Abu Dhabi campus is just one symptom of the greater problem the author is making. Grand real estate ambitions in lower Manhattan cost a lot of money; what many consider over-the-top perks for professors (or administration) also cost a lot of money. The school has a small endowment compared to what it would like to consider its peer group; therefore the cost of all these things, which, in the author's opinion, do very little to improve a student's education all fall onto the students as increased tuition.

I tend to agree wholeheartedly with the author, and see symptoms of the same thing at my alma mater, which feels the need to rebrand itself as Stony Brook University instead of SUNY Stony Brook, because it doesn't want to sound as much like a state school.

<comment><USER7> All of what you mention can be true and I still find it comical to say "NYU eats world." The British Empire "ate the world." Many people have wrote "Google eats the world." Grand real estate ambitions in NYC and a giant satellite campus in Abu Dhabi is not eating the world.

<comment><USER9> Ah, but for a certain breed of New Yorker, downtown Manhattan constitutes the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While human rights violations by a major US university's satellite campus are certainly concerning, on the topic of professor salaries, so what? NYU has top programs in a number of areas (The Courant Institute, for instance), and Manhattan, especially lower Manhattan, ain't cheap. If you want to compete with the Stanfords and the MITs and the Harvards of the world for top talent, you are going to have to spend some bread. I don't see the problem here.

<comment><USER2> Courant is getting better, but when I was there the faculty was lackluster and was so heavily based on mathematical theory that it was getting smoked by more modern programs like CMU's or Stanford's. I would not recommend Courant to anyone looking to study CS, but it may have changed. Evan Korth was doing a lot to make moves, but a lot of the faculty was antiquated and it looked like he was fighting an uphill battle. During one of my lectures I literally had a TA stand behind a professor as he lectured and wave his hands frantically as the professor taught us incorrect things. The TA would stay behind for a few minutes and explain what the professor, in his senility, had gotten wrong. Another class I had a teacher cancel literally 2 weeks in a row of class, as well as probably 4 or 5 other individual classes throughout the semester (nearly half the semester was canceled because he was "sick"). Of course the tested material remained the same...

All that for the bargain price of just $55,000 a year. I dropped out 6 months later and have never looked back.

<comment><USER11> > _so heavily based on mathematical theory_

er, that would be the Courant Institute of _Mathematical Sciences_ , and while the CS department is within it, it's not really surprising that they would have a focus on mathematics. And they are indeed very well respected, especially in applied mathematics (and to a lesser extent, pure mathematics).

Not sure why this comment bothered me so much, but there are important things outside of CS :) I'm not very familiar with their reputation in computer science circles, however.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, you're absolutely correct, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As a math institute I have no problems with it, and it has a great reputation. I have a number of friends who felt the program was good.

Regardless, the main problems with the place are the people teaching in the CS program, not the material being taught (although that could use an update as well).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will people pay for privacy? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/keen-on-michael-fertik-why-people-will-pay-for-privacy/

<comment><USER2> We're already paying for it with our personal data and no one seems to realize. See, e.g., all the trackers on big sites like Buzzfeed (<http://i.imgur.com/bGepZ.png>) and imgur (<http://imgur.com/a9On0>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Privacy is a right. You should not have to pay for it.</comment>


Doing Y Combinator a second time - <AUTHOR> http://kulveer.co.uk/2012/01/28/doing-y-combinator-a-second-time/

<comment><USER2>
      I've experienced PG's reality distortion field,
      and his no-nonsense style of communication.

Are those at different times? Otherwise it seems sort of contradictory. I'm sure it makes sense from the right perspective, but I can't see it right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> PG is never afraid to mince his words. If you suck at presenting for example, he will tell you.

By reality distortion, PG has an amazing ability to sell you on a vision. It's often times because he has spend a lot of time thinking about a problem or a solution, and there's no real way to argue back in real-time.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that just more of being a visionary?

I get the reality-distortion field from Jobs thing, but that was much more specific to his personality. He didn't care whether or not things were possible, he just told people to figure them out.

I'm sure that overlaps with vision casting in some sense, but I would hate to see the word "reality distortion field" pop up all over the place and start being a SV buzzword when people are really just referring to leadership.

<comment><AUTHOR> With Jobs, wasn't it his ability to get people to suspend disbelief and bend their view of the world to his?

In any case, visionary applies just as much.

I'm not unique in this observation, other founders say the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Likewise, the mandatory installation of Excel becomes super easy with the deal from Microsoft."

Huh? mandatory installation of Excel?

<comment><USER5> Not just for YC folks - Microsoft has their BizSpark program, which is pretty awesome for startups - it gives you access to basically every Microsoft product ever made for free.

<http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/>

<comment><USER6> I can confirm that this program is great! Our startup leveraged it as much as we could. It also includes other free things such as Windows Azure hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where are the bars in San Francisco where people are likely to know what Y Combinator is? I just moved here and don't know of them.

<comment><USER8> I feel like SOMA is now the center of mass of the tech startup scene. Try 21st Amendment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 3 cheers for Garry. Might mean future YC companies need to bring in design co- founders.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice write up, Kul. A no brainer to go through YC again. Talk soon!

</comment><comment><USER11> A good read, thanks for the insight into YC!</comment>


There's gotta be a better way of programming web applications - <AUTHOR> Much of the task of building a web application is fetching data and sending it through a pipeline of software to eventually get to the user, and conversely getting the data from the user and sending it back through a pipeline of software to return in the database.
The pipeline consists of apis and interfaces and transformations and validations and authentications and authorizations and sdks and data stores/databases.  These take the form of database fields, HTTP APIs web browser input and output components, bits of business logic that transform and make decisions - basically everything that goes to make up an application.
So much of programming is setting the expected ins and outs of each step, and so much debugging is fixing it where the expected ins and outs are wrong.
Surely there has to be a better way that, in a unified and universally programmable way, allows the programmer to assemble a data flow, align the expected input and output fields and specify which bits of code run them.
Does this exist?  Or are there projects headed in this direction?  It's just silly to be writing code that essentially is dealing with connecting data inputs and outputs together.
I'm not talking about something that dumbs it down for end users, like the well regarded IFFT, but a new and sophisticated approach to programming that is oriented primarily toward defining end to end data flows through sophisticated applications and data stores.
Maybe some sort of universal component that defines data in and out and people write connectors so any and every bit of software talks to it. Good idea, stupid idea? <comment><USER2> There are innumerable frameworks that can help with certain aspects of the transport chain but I don't believe there is a one stop shop Webapp IDE. Netbeans has a ton of features and you can pretty much build the entire DB->Server->Client architecture with it. However, there is still a lot left to the programmer.

If you are a java programmer, you can use Hibernate to manipulate sql with java objects, and spring to translate those java objects into JavaBeans/JSF/JSP for display in the browser. That helps cut down on the number of adapter classes you need to write by hand.

If you use other languages, I would recommend standardizing your messages to json since there are a lot of libraries out there for handling it during various stages of your communication chain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not talking about the IDE, but at the application layer.

Kinda like chaining together unix commands via pipes but instead chaining together back end and front end components.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting idea - especially the idea of application layers as pipes.

It strikes me that these pipes "partially execute" \- I suppose if you can characterize the types of partial executions, you could define the application in a generic way.</comment>


Google: We have proof that our quantum computer really works - <AUTHOR> http://wap.engadget.com/2015/12/09/google-we-have-proof-that-our-quantum-computer-really-works/ <comment><USER2> Very exciting announcement. I never quite understood all the criticism and doubt of DWave. Do people think Google wouldn't do due diligence before investing hundred of millions of dollars in the tech? Anyway, happy to see this announcement and looking forward to hearing more in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this mean that the "global minimum for a given function" can be the global minimum for a neuron in ML? Sounds like it does.</comment>


True, False, & NULL/None/nil/Blank logic in MySQL, Python, Ruby, and Excel - <AUTHOR> http://zachaysan.tumblr.com/post/410295641/true-false-null-none-nil-blank-logic-in-mysql

<comment><USER2> Interesting tables, but he obviously hasn't read about or doesn't understand, lazy-evaluation used in Ruby (not to mention most other programming languages), as he says that "nil and false" should give him false rather than nil. I believe he just assumes that both sides of the condition get evaluated when they don't. (Edit: However he did post a correction and explanation of lazy-evaluation/short-circuit evaluation at the bottom of the post. Just goes to show how something can be thought of as simple and intuitive if you have the right concepts and frame of mind.)

Still an interesting article describing how people on the data side of the fence see these programming constructs.</comment>


1/3 of new PCs ship without Windows 7. What's filling the gap? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/open-source/159695/windows-7-share-decline-could-mean-security-headaches <comment><USER2> Well firstly the number of PCs figure is an estimate so there could be significant error there.

A fair number of machines still sell with Vista (some with XP-or-Vista) and many are sold blank with the end user putting Linux on or a hooky copy of Windows.

Obviously some people will be putting Linux on the new machines, even though very few _ship_ with the alternate OS (most Linux users buy a machine with no OS and install their preferred Linux arrangement).

But I suspect a massive part of the discrepancy is people reusing old Windows licenses with newer PCs, particularly in corporate environments where the company will have bought X user licenses which are valid no matter what the user uses them on: so when the new machine is bought the company standard build is installed (and the license transferred in any asset tracking system the organisation has) before the old machine is binned.

Some of these reused licenses will be windows 7 ones, though the majority will be XP or Vista as many companies are sill stuck on Vista or XP for their standard desktop OS builds (one large financial company I could mention only completed their move away from _NT_ , to XP, in 2006 - I doubt they'll be using 7 any time soon!).</comment>


Photographer wins $1.2 million from companies that took pictures off Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/22/us-media-copyright-twitter-idUSBRE9AL16F20131122

<comment><USER2> Fucking good. Just because it's publicly viewable doesn't grant a license for use. Getty should know that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pics or it didn't happen</comment>


New responsive click-track software lets drummers set their own pace - <AUTHOR> http://www.politics.co.uk/opinion-formers/press-releases/culture-media-and-sport/epsrc-new-responsive-click-track-software-lets-drummers-set-their-own-pace-$21386630$365397.htm <comment><USER2> Yet another useless mobile site which intercepts article deep links from mobile users and takes them to the main page instead. At least this particular article is still available down the front page of the mobile site for now.</comment>


Pangaea 'Breaking Appart' Explained - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/618391123200786432/pangaea-break <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://theconversation.com/how-the-earths-last- supercontine...](https://theconversation.com/how-the-earths-last- supercontinent-broke-apart-to-form-the-world-we-have-today-131632)

This site also traps back-arrow navigation.</comment>


Mind and habitat: Nuclear and climate threats, and the possibility of hope  - <AUTHOR> http://thebulletin.org/mind-and-habitat-nuclear-and-climate-threats-and-possibility-hope7051 <comment><AUTHOR> This is a deep-tought piece by Robert Jay Lifton and I hope it gets some readers.</comment>


Amazon Coins - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=zeroes_surl_c_landing?docId=1000745313&ref_=tsm_1_fb_s_uk_mwnu2i coins to spend in app and games <comment><USER2> Aw christ, no.

I hope this dies quickly, or at least isn't as horrifying as Facebook credits.

See, I worked at a Facebook game company when the Facebook credit thing came online and it was _universally_ a bad deal for game devs. It was Yet Another Payment Chain to implement, a weird checkout flow (we had an off-site version of the same game which could use PayPal, but not FB credits, whereas on the Facebook version of the game, you could use FB credits, but not PayPal, etc), and credits were actually worth way less than actual cash and you never knew how much less until way later.

See, Facebook offered similar incentives as Amazon here: free promotional Facebook credits to get people using the system, bonus credits for larger orders, etc. However, those credits were marked as "promotional" internally, and if you accepted promotionial FB credits, you didn't get any money. That's right, the game devs ate the cost of promoting FB credits. Plus, you had no idea if you were accepting promotional FB credits or real ones, or if certain big companies got a sweeter deal on getting a higher real/promotional balance, AND you didn't know how many of your credits were real or promotional until the balance report came in, making it kind of difficult to identify just how much money you'd actually earned.

Now maybe Amazon will eat their promotional costs themselves here, but to any dev considering implementing this, be wary, and read everything. I know that's standard advice, obviously, but it should be especially so with your cashflow, and I'm _personally_ wary as fuck about this, given just how similar to FB credits it appears.

<comment><USER3> |Now maybe Amazon will eat their promotional costs themselves here.

You hit the nail on the head. If the account of the pocketcast devs is correct, in order to be featured as Amazons "free app of the day," you eat all costs as the dev. I would expect they are doing the same thing here.

[http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store- rott...](http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to- the-core/)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I'd be SUPER surprised if it's not FB credits all over again, with devs receiving scads of no-value Amazon promotional coins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Only semi-related, I must have $200 in loose change collected over the years (and years). What the hell to do with them?

Turns out I can take them to coinstar at the local Krogers and turn them into cash but they will take a chunk of the change that I am too miserly to part with.

OR, wow, I can turn them into an Amazon gift card! I mean, I can turn them into Home Depot cards (and many other cards), but I live in an apartment.

So that's awesome and I test it with $20 in quarters, AND, AND, AND,

Machine almost instantly jams.

No one uses the coinstar except for the most part as trash can so when the manager rips the machine apart we find safety pins, and buttons, and all sorts of crap.

Oh well.

Hey, the coinstar.com tells me Walmart has a machine too. Let's check that out and and and -- the walmart machines don't allow conversion to Amazon money. My guess is that Amazon is Walmarts biggest enemy.

Oh well. I now have about $180 of loose change.

<comment><USER5> Most banks will convert change for free for account holders. Local banks and credit unions often won't even ask if one has an account.

<comment><USER6> Yea but you have to roll them up yourself in those paper sleeves.

To quote George Costanza while rolling coins: "You want me to roll six thousand of these?! What, should I quit my job?!"

<comment><USER7> No way, they have awesome fast coin counting machines at banks. You dump it in and it counts in real-time, like 15 seconds and you're done.

<comment><USER8> What bank?

<comment><USER9> My local Chase branch does free coin counting as well as other banks that are actually all Chase banks now.

It never made sense to me that a bank would want you to bring in rolled coins. How could they trust the contents?

<comment><USER6> They must weigh them or something. When I rolled my own change once I was short 1 cent in a dollar penny roll and they sent me snail mail about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are Amazon coins region-locked? The USD version is much cheaper. [http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-500-Coins/dp/B0096E8CQA/ref=sr_...](http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-500-Coins/dp/B0096E8CQA/ref=sr_sp- atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385132993&sr=8-1&keywords=amazon+coin)

</comment><comment><USER10> Just another centralised virtual currency. Don't see the value offering here really.

<comment><USER11> They did pick a peculiar logo though.

<comment><USER7> That's clearly not an amazon though. She has both... uh, mazzes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale Is this an "affiliate" link? As in, do you make money or any equivalent when I click this [and buy something]?

I see: ref_=tsm_1_fb_s_uk_mwnu2i

Probably harmless. Just curious.

<comment><USER12> Amazon affiliate links have a URL component (in the path or GET variables) that match the glob "tag=*-20" (supposedly it could end with numbers other than 20 but I've never seen anything other than 20).

<comment><USER13> US is -20. Other countries have other numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I might take a second look if they allowed it to float against other currencies and opened an exchange.

</comment><comment><USER15> "What is Amazon Coins?"</comment>


NoScript 22.214.171.124 removes the controversial Adblock Plus hack - <AUTHOR> http://noscript.net/changelog

<comment><USER2> Too late for me, I removed it already. This is a matter of trust, not features.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, that was quick, and really I think it was the only solution. The difference here although there are defined extension interfaces in Adblock, NoScript was subverting the expected functionality rather than extending it. I'd rather not have extensions fighting among each other.

<comment><USER4> _I think it was the only solution._

I doubt it's actually a solution. NoScript generated sufficient ill-will between the constant "updates" that are just an excuse to send you forcibly to their home page and this sort of underhand mess that a lot of users have just outright uninstalled it and won't go back. It's not as if writing an alternative will be hard, and I imagine we'll see one within days, if only because somewhere in the world there's a hacker sufficiently offended by the behaviour that he writes a replacement just to sting them. It only takes one...

<comment><USER5> It's open source. FF extensions are just renamed zip files, Fork away!

<comment><USER3> Open source doesn't mean 'licence to copy', but in this case it's GPL so yeah, go right ahead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The NoScript FAQ on the subject has also been updated: <http://noscript.net/faq#qa3_21>

For more background on this debate, check out this post at Adblock: <http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users></comment>


Crab-powered computer created by scientists - <AUTHOR> http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3351318/crab-powered-computer-built-by-british-japanese-scientists/

<comment><USER2> overclocking = delicious treat</comment>


Ask HN: Why websites don't mine coins in my browser, instead of showing me ads? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Why don't you just mine coins in your browser instead of visiting web sites?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why should someone else make money off my hardware? install noscript if you dont want to see ads or install a browser like brave to get rid of them.</comment>


Ask HN : Do Node.js needs another package manager? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a javascripter but in recent years, I had no choice but to work with ruby/rails for server-side things.
Now that node as arrived, I consider it's heading the same way that ruby is with the way it manages its packages. Npm is a rubygem-like manager but I have been frustrated over the years with gems because it's a central repository that can go really wrong if you mess with it. I had problems on when I tried Ruby1.9 and when I moved to Rails 3 because everything is central and if a config changes, it can break it all. Sometimes, I feel stuck in rubygems-hell like I was stuck in DLL-hell back in the days.
I would want node.js to avoid central repositories and I would prefer projects be stand-alone : you clone it and you run it in its own environment. That means having the right node version in a "bin" directory but also having modules installed in its subdirectories.
Example, if you have three projects using Express, you'll have 3 copies of Express, one in each of the subdirs of the projects.
Would you use that kind of package manager? <comment><USER2> Couldn't you do that kind of thing using git submodules?

<http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html></comment>


The majority of Americans say they did not get a pay raise this year - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-majority-of-americans-did-not-get-a-pay-raise-this-year-2018-12-12 <comment><USER2> To state the obvious - when there is any inflation at all, those who didn't receive a pay raise will be receiving a pay deduction.

<comment><USER3> In my country we used to have a state mandated "automatic inflation adjustment compensation" (so, like a mandatory raise to match the inflation index).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In an institution board that I serve on, healthcare eats the budgetary space for increased compensation.

There's also a high degree of uncertainty given the political situation. It's difficult to budget.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see an analysis of "incidental" expenditure increases over the past decade. For example the increase cost of a phone bill with the addition of a three year payment plan for a $1100 phone. The added cost of student load payments starting to eat at new graduates. Increasing number of subscription services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Imperfect Produce. The addition of "Gig" and event economy expenditures such as Uber, UberEats, PrimeNow, AirBnB, StubHub, etc.

If I break down my expenses over the past three years I can clearly identify the lifestyle creep of modern consumerism. Is this the new norm? Is this what's responsible for articles like this? Or is it just more traditional inflation?

<comment><USER4> For the lazy, they are significant.

My family's baseline expenditures are down except for food. Cord cutting reduced expenses significantly and buying phones and shopping plans cut that cost.

If you're using Uber and paying $10 for takeout delivery all of the time, you're wasting money, full stop.

<comment><USER6> 'Wasting money' or just 'paying a premium for the convenience'.

<comment><USER4> Depends. I know a lot of people who are hooked to convenience they don't need and are having bigger problems elsewhere as a result.

I helped a person that I mentor figure out that they could literally take 7 years off of student loan repayment by ditching Starbucks and picking up their own pizza (or god forbid picking up the phone and ordering that way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't most people get no raise most years?

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't say no raise, but my raises have only been over 3% twice in over 20 years and that was really early in my career.

Job hopping is the only way to get a meaningful raise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't mention historical data. I'm willing to believe (actually I'd even bet) it's worse today than during previous booms, but why oh why can't we have better sources on this site?

<comment><USER10> [https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awidevelop.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awidevelop.html)

2018 numbers not reported (obviously), and given this being the first year of the tax overhaul, this year "should" have resulted in a much higher average increase in salary (if you believe trickle down to work, this would be the year for it to finally work.)

<comment><USER11> Based on the average that most people received, it's unlikely that unless you were making decent money already you received much. The average worker in the US makes around $45k/year which amounts to a tax break of about $20 a week. So a single fill up of gas or less per week. I'm not thinking most people are wowed. Now shareholders got a huge break, companies flat out admitted that they were going to use the money to make their shareholders wealthier, which is plainly their right. It was a terrible tax plan that increased the deficit, did nothing to really help those who needed it, and moved more money to the already wealthy.

[https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/pf/taxes/paychecks-new- tax-...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/pf/taxes/paychecks-new-tax- law/index.html)

[https://www.thebalancecareers.com/average-salary- information...](https://www.thebalancecareers.com/average-salary-information- for-us-workers-2060808)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to The Economist, blue collar wages are rising faster than white collar wages, something that hasn't happened in a long time.

[https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/11/14/blue- coll...](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/11/14/blue-collar-wages- are-surging-can-it-last)

</comment><comment><USER13> I assume health insurance has gone up at least a little bit.

<comment><USER14> On a side note, my employer while at the time of slashing 12.5% of its workforce ate the heath insurance increase and did not pass it on to its left over employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do the majority of Americans deserve a raise in the first place? I think a bit of humility might be a good thing to help us rethink our materialistic impulses and desires. This is coming from someone who asked for one, but didn't receive a raise this year.

<comment><USER16> A better question: do a tiny minority of Americans deserve to take all of the productivity gains that would otherwise be distributed to the majority of Americans as raises? Maybe the people who claim they deserve billions of dollars should exercise a bit of humility, instead, eh, and start handing out the money.

<comment><USER8> The statistical middle class could easily say the same about most tech people.

While we may look at billionaires as "them", people with a household income of 60K a year (the median household income), can't dream of why people who just sit and type on a keyboard deserve six figure salaries.

<comment><USER16> Not "easily", since the difference is one of several orders of magnitude. A person making 60K has to work three years to make as much someone making 180K. A person making 200K has to work five hundred years to make as much as someone making 100M.

No one works hard enough to "deserve" that much money; this is why kings used to appeal to divine right. Nowadays the justifications are non-existent, we just pretend otherwise because we are cowards.

While we're speaking of "deserving" our money, what moral framework do we use to make this calculus? I'm dubious you could identify a credible moral universe in which one person deserves hundreds of millions, while hundreds of millions work themselves to the bone and still deserve nothing.

<comment><USER8> Yes mathematically you are correct. But emotionally, it is just as out of reach for many people to make six figures as it is for most people to make a billion.

When people start voting for policies that "tax the rich", the people making twice as much as they make are going to be lumped in with people making 100x as much.

As far as moral argument. How can I make the "moral argument" that I deserve to make five or six times what the custodian makes for just typing on a keyboard and creating pretty architectural diagrams in Visio?

Also, if both the person bringing home $5000/month and the person bringing home $15,000/month both have bills totaling $4000/month. The person bringing home $15K a month can build wealth 11 times faster.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GetSEOfix - All in One SEO Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.getseofix.com <comment><AUTHOR> GetSEOfix is the revolutionary All in one SEO platform with everything you need to boost your website rankings by using over 35 powerful SEO tools, 6 quick SEO guides, 52 video lessons and a private Facebook VIP group.</comment>


Health Insurance vs. Food Insurance - <AUTHOR> http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2013/06/12/health-insurance-vs-food-insurance/

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the author's argument about insurance, but I hate HSAs. Things like HSAs are a regressive tax on people who don't have accountants and/or disposable income. It's also a regressive tax on small businesses and entrepreneurs due to the administrative overhead. Anything that complicates matters is a regressive "complexity tax."

<comment><USER2> No, HSAs aren't _like a tax._ Quite the opposite, in fact: they are a way to shield the part of your income you might spend on healthcare costs from taxation.

On your more basic point of complexity: yes, things ought to be simpler. So that's why we should move to a flat tax, where everyone pays the same low rate, no exceptions. Looking over the next few decades, such a flat tax should just be a stepping stone to a truly voluntary system, where no one pays any taxes at all. The essential functions of government are those functions that are required to protect individual rights, and no others (other roles violate the rights of some, in order to provide unearned benefits to others). A proper government, consisting only of the police, military, and courts - could be funded by proceeds from the sale of optional contract insurance (which would buy each purchaser faster access to mediation in a civil court). Because such a government would be very small, it could even be funded by voluntary contributions from citizens, without any legal requirement.

Getting there will require a gradual but massive revolution in people's ethical and political views, but I think that this is the only moral way to structure a society, and the only one that is practical, in the long-term.</comment></comment>